It was the result of through natural crossbreeding of two other coffee species and emerged first in Ethiopia.
They were used for the drink, as far as we can tell, first in the 1400s to 1600s, having been brought to Yemen, which means they were probably brewed for that purpose in reality long before that.
On this day in 1623 Josaphat Kuntsevych, Bishop of the Ruthenian Catholic Church (Ukrainian Catholic Church, was martyred in Vitebsk, Belarus, which was the part of the Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth.
He had been ordained in as an Eastern Catholic priest in 1609. Living in a region in which the Orthodox Church had been strong, he faced opposition in his clerical duties but movement towards union with Rome was building in the area and as there was building assent to the Union of Brest. In 1620 this began to be opposed when Cossacks intervened in the region. In 1623, Josaphat, by then a Bishop, ordered the arrest of the sole remaining priest who was offering Orthodox services in Vitebsk which resulted in his murder by some Orthodox townspeople. Some have suggested that, however, Lithuanian Protestants were secretly the instigators of the action.
His body is in Saint Peter's Basilica in Rome, and he is recognized as a martyr by the Church.
This points out a lot of interesting aspects of history that in the United States, and indeed many places, are poorly understood. For one thing, there have been repeated efforts to reunite the East and West in Apostolic Christianity, and on several occasions they've been highly successful. The seeming final breach between the East and West did not really come until the fall of Constantinople in 1453 and indeed at that time the East and West were largely reunited. Following the return of the schism, over the next 500+ years various churches in the East have returned to communion with Rome. The Schism should have completely ended following the Council of Florence, in which the Eastern Bishops agreed to reunion, but resistance at the parishioner level precluded it, just as can be seen to be a factor here. Resistance higher up, sometimes violent, has also had an impact, however, as at least in one occasion Russian Orthodox Bishops affecting a reunion were murdered. At the present time, it seems clear that the Metropolitan of Constantinople, the senior Bishop of the Eastern Orthodox, would end the schism as to his church but for fear of parishioner and cleric level resistance.
Rodrigo de Arriaga professed vows to become a Jesuit Priest. He was one of the leading Spanish Jesuits of his day.
Since the Act of Union in 1707, there have been only thirteen British monarchs, the first being Queen Anne. The current royal family, if we discuss direct and not remote ancestry, dates back only to William of Orange, who was king from 1689 to 1702, prior to the Act of Union. Anne was his successor and reigned until 1714. She was in ill health most of the time.
Had the throne passed to Anne's nearest relatives, it would have gone to a member of the House of Stuart, who were Catholic. Anne was an Anglican, but she was the daughter of Charles II who became Catholic on his deathbed and who harbored strong Catholic sympathies, in spite of living a wild life, his entire life. Indeed, his father Charles I was a High Church Anglican who teetered on that edge himself. George I was chosen over 60 Stuart claimants simply because the Whigs had taken control of parliament, and he was a protestant.
I note this as people not familiar with the English monarchy, or perhaps more accurately the monarchy of the United Kingdom, seem to assume that the throne has always been inherited. Not so. It's been inherited since George I, when he was crowned the King over Catholic claimants who held undoubtedly better claims.
The second item of interest there is that the British monarchy is, therefore, by recent tradition, and by law, "Protestant", which his to say, Anglican.
Those watching the coronation yesterday, if they were not familiar with the process, would have been struck by how deeply religious it was. I don't think people, or perhaps more accurately Americans, expected that, as Americans have the stupid Disney view of monarchy, in which there'd be a two-minute coronation involving beautiful people, rather than an hours long service. Moreover, people with some religious knowledge, but not familiar with the process, would have been surprised that it was recognizable as a Mass, in Catholic terms.
Indeed, some commentators, including the Catholic Cardinal who participated in it, noted that it has "some" Catholic elements.
"Some"?
Baloney, it's 100% Catholic in form save for the King having to take the mandatory oath that he support the United Kingdom's Protestant faith.
That became a topic running up to this because, in spite of the impressive performance, the Church of England is in real trouble in England. It does remain strong in some places, but not in its old footholds. In the United States and Canada, its North American expression, the Episcopal Church, is in really deep trouble. In the UK, more Catholics attend services weekly than members of the Church of England, which is really something given that Catholics are a minority religion in the UK and have been at least since Elizabeth I forced the "religious settlement" on the country. Lest that seem too encouraging for Catholics, all devout religious adherence has been on the decline in the UK for a very long time, a product of the disaster of the Reformation, which is playing out presently.
Be that as it may, at least to Catholic eyes, the absurdity of the English Reformation is brought to full light by such events. The ceremony was so Catholic that the question has to be asked why the Church of England doesn't just come back into the fold, something which is becoming increasingly difficult in light of its recent accommodations to popular social trends.
Which brings me to my next observation.
I know one fallen away Episcopalian who is deeply anti-Catholic. It's interesting how that tends to be the last thing that those raised in the "main line" Protestant Churches retain. The Baby Boomer children of adherent Main Line Protestant churches may have chosen to ignore their faiths in favor of the world and its delights, but they remember the fables and hatred that the Reformation used to justify its actions, and still cite it as if they were buddies with John Calvin himself. Odd.
I know that I'm personally tired of it. But in part, that's because I'm tired of having to listen to two people I personally know debate religious topics as if it's a sport. It isn't. It's serious. But then maybe I'm tired of people who argue just for sport as well.
Profoundly Christian, and frankly about as close to Catholic in form as you can get and not be Catholic, another interesting aspect of the coronation was reinforcing the United Kingdom's Christian heritage.
And that's a good thing.
The Coronation really brought the monarchy haters out in droves, which was interesting. Lots of "Not My King" and "Not My Queen" individual protests were here and there. Well, unless Parliament abolished the monarchy, if you are English or a resident of the English Commonwealth, he is your king. You don't have to love him, but that doesn't mean he isn't the king.
This also brought out a lot of sanctimonious blathering by people who hail from former imperial possessions about the horrors of the British Empire. Well, whatever they may be, King Charles III and his mother Queen Elizabeth II weren't responsible for any of them.
Indeed, it's been eons since there was a king or queen really had extensive power. Maybe since King Charles II. The UK has been a constitutional monarch at least since Queen Anne. If monarchy had been what people imagine, one of her Stuart relatives would have been the next monarch, not King George I. So if people have a beef with the British Empire, it shouldn't really be with Queen Elizabeth, whom some proclaimed they could not mourn, or with King Charles III, whom some proclaim they cannot celebrate.
Let's make no mistake. Colonialism in general was bigoted and racist by its very nature. The underlying premise of it was that the European colonial power, and here we will limit this to European powers, was empowered by some sort of superior value which gave it a right to take the land of others and rule its people. That was the underlying thesis of colonialism everywhere. Generally the "superior" something they had was technology, which made it possible, but which didn't make it right.
But before we get too self-righteous about it, we probably need to take a look at in context, and over time, and then ask if the compulsion that gives rise to it is a universal human norm. That would not mean that it was right, but it might lessen the overall guilt.
Indeed, in spite of what people might now wish for claim, when European colonialism started the concept of one nation ruling over another was not only common, it was the norm. In the early 17th Century when British Colonialism really started, Ireland and Wales were already unwelcome members, to some extent, of the United Kingdom, and Scotland wasn't all that keen on it. Figuring out who governed in the Low Countries and the German Principalities requires an epic flow chart. Russia ruled vasts lands with no Russians. This condition would go on well into the 19th Century, and even to some extent into the 20th Century. Contrary to what people claim, national feelings existed, but people didn't regard empires and monarchies that ruled over a collection of nations to be abnormal.
And it would have been extremely difficult for Europeans, early on, to be confronted with foreign cultures beyond their seas and treat them as equals given the varied states of development. It's easy for us to say that the British should have landed at Jamestown in 1607 only after asking for permission, but frankly, it would have been impossible for them to have conceived it that way at the time.
This might not be the case for later European colonial efforts, but by that time competition between European powers nearly mandated acquiring colonies and a person would have to be naive to imagine that if the British had abstained, the French, Dutch, Germans, Spanish, and so on, would have done so also.
Indeed, frankly, if we were to land humans on Mars today, and find something waddle up and address us in some bizarre Martian tongue, I don't believe we'd abstain from colonizing the planet now.
Which gets to this point. I can't really think easily of a people anywhere that had the power to colonize, and didn't do it. Everyone did. It seems to go back to our earliest days. That doesn't make it right, once again, but it's obviously a common human trait.
Which means in turn that the only really valid criticism of empire that mean anything today has to come in terms of relatively recent historical context.
A conversation on this point the other day made me realize how different my "relatively recent" is. The actual conversation was on British primogenitor in the monarchy. I sincerely regard everything after 1066 as recent in terms of the British monarchy.
Apparently, other people don't.
In this context, however, i.e., that of empire, I'd probably go back to 1800 or so. If you are going to levy guilt on the British, therefore, you might have to start in 1858 when Parliament caused the British to officially take over India.
There's a lot to blame the English for after that, but then there's a lot to blame the French, Belgians, Dutch and Germans for after that as well.
It's really the late 19th Century and 20th Century when you get into the full-blown "shouldn't you people have known better" type of situation. The Scramble for Africa is pretty difficult to justify in any sense.
Which takes us, I suppose, to this. In its late stages, while it was still an empire, and should have known better, at least the British did a good job of trying to administer what it was administering well. Its actions weren't always admirable or successful. The Bengal Famine of 1943 provides a shocking example of that. And frankly, there's no way to reconcile the claim that the British were fighting for freedom only during World War Two, except comparatively. I.e., the Axis wasn't seeking to liberate colonial peoples, but to enslave them to somebody else less democratic yet. But, having said that, the British, more than any other colonial power, managed to depart from empire gracefully and with some rationale hope that the best things it had given to the people it had occupied would remain.
It didn't always work out, but to a surprising degree it did. British Dominions largely did evolve into full-blown parliamentary democracies and largely separated from the UK peaceably, although this was notably not the case with Ireland. Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Ireland and South Africa are all democracies today due to the British example. So, frankly, is the United States, the UK's first failed imperial endeavor.
The coronation of King Charles III probably contains within it a series of lessons that will only be evident in the coming days. But for those who want to protest it, well you probably would better spend your time on real problems of the world, of which there are many.
Related Items:
What Did the Pilgrims Eat at the First Thanksgiving?
If our current celebration is accurate, they ate giant turkeys, mashed potatoes, and yams covered with marshmallows. . . which you know can't be perfectly accurate.
As a contrarian, I've often maintained they ate salted cod. . . and I don't know that I am necessarily completely inaccurate, but as they were living in land with a low population density, unless they were inept or simply to scared to go beyond their villages, we all know that they likely were eating a fair amount of wild game. Indeed, the current European American trend for veganism and vegetarianism is something that could only come about in an industrialized society that actually kills a lot of animals just getting the tofu to the fair trade store, but that's another story.
Anyhow, this interesting article maintains that they ate the follows:
What They (Likely) Did Have at the First Thanksgiving
Sounds likely, and pretty darned good too.
The article goes on to note:
What They (Definitely) Did Not Have at the First Thanksgiving
Frankly, I don't think turkey is actually impossible. Wild turkeys lived in the area and wild turkey isn't much different from domestic turkey, except in plumpness.
Something I was wholly unaware of was that there is actually a surviving letter about that meal. It relates:
Our harvest being gotten in, our governor sent four men on fowling, that so we might after a special manner rejoice together after we had gathered the fruit of our labors. They four in one day killed as much fowl as, with a little help beside, served the company almost a week. At which time, amongst other recreations, we exercised our arms, many of the Indians coming amongst us, and among the rest their greatest king Massasoit, with some ninety men, whom for three days we entertained and feasted, and they went out and killed five deer, which they brought to the plantation and bestowed on our governor, and upon the captain and others.
So, that tells us for sure that they ate fowl, by which I think they meant waterfowl, and deer. Another surviving period letter, however, relates.
And besides waterfowl there was great store of wild turkeys, of which they took many, besides venison, etc. Besides, they had about a peck a meal a week to a person, or now since harvest, Indian corn to that proportion.
Hmmm. . . could have featured turkey and corn, which is what the author means by "Indian corn" (i.e., not wheat).
Why not potatoes? Well, the Columbian exchange hadn't't gotten around to them yet, so they were unknown to the Mayflower colonists. Later they'd start to spread, massively distrusted as a food at first. Cranberries would make their appearance about fifty years later, which is really quite early.
For what it's worth, they probably boiled a lot of the food they ate as well, although roasting was a common cooking technique of the period. Frying, however, would have been much less common.
They would have had fresh vegetables, at that time of year, including staples like cabbage and beans.
You know, all in all it sounds like pretty good fare, and food you'd recognize as appropriate for this holiday, if not necessarily completely identical.
What'd they drink? We apparently know less about that, but we do know that the Mayflower had contained a store of beer and that in fact the ship put in when it did as it had become exhausted. But beer is a somewhat complicated thing to make and it would have been unlikely that they had grown the constituents to make any of it in 1621. They may have fermented something by the fall, or not. None of the stuff they had brought with them to plant works well in that context. There are berries that are native to New England that can be fermented for wine, but if they did that, no record of it is left. They may very well have just had cold water.
There's a lot of hubris in writing a blog, a principal part of that being the thoughts that 1) you have anything meaningful to say; and 2) anyone cares to read it. In large part, probably neither of those are true, so no blogger should feel compelled to write an entry. Still, some years. . .
For a lot of people, this will be a Thanksgiving like no other. Well, rather, like no other one that that we recall. There are certainly plenty of North American Thanksgivings that more strongly resemble this one than we might imagine. *
After all, the holiday was already fully established as a European religious observation long before the passengers of the Mayflower put in early as they were out of beer (which is in fact why they put in when they did). We might imagine those early Thanksgiving celebrants looking like they were out of a Rockwell or Leyendecker illustration, but they likely rarely did.
And added to that, there was the additional turmoil of vast struggles beyond people's control. Catholics lived in fear of oppression from Protestants. Protestant dissenters lived in fear of the Established Church. Jews lived in fear of everyone. Forces in England struggled against the Crown and each other and their fights spilled out to their colonies. Native Americans lived in fear of a European population of an expansive nature that seemed to defy the laws of nature. Africans lived in fear of slavers and if that fate befell them they thereafter lived in lifelong despair.
The point is, I guess, that our ancestors endured all of this and made it.
Of course, they endured it better sometimes than in others. When they lost the ability to at least get along, things got very bad indeed. The most notable example, probably, came in 1860 to 1865 when Americans had reached the point where their differences could only be solved violently.
When those things got that way, one notable thing was the fragility of civility, order and even common sense. In bad times Americans have done well if their leaders had a vision, even if disagreed with, and were clear about it, even if the opposition was distinct in that opposition. A key to it was an overall sense that we were all in this together in spite of those differences. The US did well as a society in the Great War, even with lots of failings, as it generally agreed with Wilson that something needed to be done in Europe and we had to do it, and even if we disagreed with that, we were all Americans and weren't going to send just our neighbor off to fight. We did very well in World War Two uniting behind Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman on the concept that we were a democratic nation, united by that, and we were going to bring those values to a world that had forgotten them, even if some wished the war hadn't ever come. We did pretty well in the Cold War, with the exception of some real distress in the late 40s and early 50s, and again in the late 60s and early 70s, with the idea that we were freedom's sentinel, even if we didn't always like what that meant.
Right now, we're a mess.
We are not united on anything, and we've politicized everything. And our polarization is massive.
We've been polarized of course before, but it's been sometime since we were this split, or so it would seem. Some would argue that we're really not, and that most are in the middle.
If we aren't mostly in the middle, the problem then becomes the point at which we arrive at a point at which we not only aren't, but we've reached the state where the polarized sides only see forcing their view at all costs upon the other as the solution.
Advanced nations have had that happen before. Weimar Germany lived in a state of being that started off that way in 1918 and dissolved due to that in 1932. It wasn't that there were not right wingers who valued democracy over force, or that there were not left wingers who valued democracy over force, but rather that people quit listening to them and opted for the parties that promised to force their views with dominating finality.
That is, of course, sort of what happened in 1860 to us, when one side decided that it had to have its way so much that it would leave to get it, and kill to maintain it.
Surely we're not there yet. But one thing we are is fatigued. And that's not a good thing. A lot of people have just had enough. They're worn down by the Pandemic. They're tired of politicians. They don't want to hear anymore. It's not that they're disinterested.
They're tired.
So perhaps we can look back on those early North American Thanksgivings here a bit. The crops didn't fail. The North Koreans didn't attack South Korea. The Chinese didn't invade Taiwan. The Russians didn't suddenly decide they wanted Poland back.
And yes, a lot of us fell ill, some will never fully recover, and some have died. That will continue on. But as tragic as that is, we've had their better times and our prior health, and as grim as it is, it serves as a reminder that our path through here is temporary, and if, in the words of the old country song, we "don't have a home in this world anymore", well we never had a perfect one.
Related threads:
The History of the Retriever: A look back at the fascinating origins of the duck dogworth taking a look at.
What may come as a surprise to some retriever enthusiasts is the fact that the standard poodle, which originated in Germany, ranks as one of the oldest sporting dog breeds in the world. Poodles, which are both intelligent and strong swimmers, were sometimes referred to as "rough water dogs." These animals are a far cry from the miniature and toy versions that were later developed in France as pets. The French, however, were well aware of this breed's background. Poodles were called caniche in France, which translates to "duck dog." Poodles arrived in the United States late in the 19th century.
Donald J. Trump 
‘Great War’ brought Catholics, bishops into mainstream of US society
